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Friday, January 10, 2014

I have suddenly found myself very busy again and not in a good way either. I've been on my hands and knees, wiping and cleaning and tidying up my study.

Now I had no intention of spending any time doing any sort of housework even though I really should because Chinese New Year is coming and you're supposed to make your home nice and clean. I'm a very lazy person. Plus I have many Internet things to do.

You all know my home is very messy on account of my sporadic cleaning/tidying schedule aka when I feel like it. And I don't like people touching my stuff so I don't hire a cleaning person. Each time I sew madly for a craft market, I leave stuff around, on the floor, any space I can find. The study room is where I do my sewing so you can imagine how much stuff has accumulated. One space in particular was in danger of collapsing as I had run out of space and started to pile up. Towards the ceiling.

So let me help you picture it. My study room. It's very small, squarish. It has no doors, just a wide opening that leads to the living room. There are 2 computers on one side of one wall. 2 tall open bookshelves one on each side of the wall. In between is a big window. There is also an ironing board, irons, my sewing table, a wardrobe for my bags plus a million things on whatever available space is on the floor. So why didn't I take a picture of the room before I started tidying up? Well, this is not one of those "being real" kind of post. I go to great length to crop out the messiness because it is so horrifying.

Well, back to my study room. It is almost impossible to walk all the way to the windows because of the stuff on the floor. I felt quite guilty and all because they're mostly my stuff but I had Internet things to do.

Then three days ago, hubs stood in the study surveying. Then he started yelling about the curtains. Yes, the curtains. He wanted to change the curtains because they were dirty and not hung properly and he felt they made our home look so horrible, much much worse than what it was.

That's right, the curtains. Not the mountain of stuff on the floor. Just the curtains.

Now I should have let hubs change the curtains. Then I would be happily doing Internet things. Instead I told him I would take care of it. I have this thing about putting something clean on something dirty. It's just so weird. So I cleaned the window grilles. That took at least 2 hours. I cleaned the chest of drawers below the windows. I tidied up. I threw stuff away. Finally I could hang up clean curtains. And the stuff I had moved to get to the curtains? I had to sort, pack and find new spaces for them. Basically I ended up doing spring cleaning. But it's just the study room you understand? So don't come visiting.

Here are some in progress shots.

Then I discovered a small library of my books hidden in a corner beside the window which I had forgotten about. Do you know when we first moved into our home, hubs wouldn't let me put any of my fiction books on the two bookshelves he had bought. He has a lot of books and certainly was able to fill up the shelves. Every time I left a book on his shelves, he would remove it and put it in a obscure corner. I would put it back and he would banish it to the obscure corner again. One day he bought me my very own book shelf. A tiny tall book shelf where I could put all my fiction books and leave his untainted.

Clearly I have forgotten my bookshelf of books. A huge layer of dust had settled. Spider webs were woven and discarded. Ferns have grown. Lizards have laid their shats over and over behind the bookshelf on the floor. (I have polite lizards - they left my books alone) It took me a very long time but I managed to get rid of the dust.

I'm so happy to be reunited with my books. I hope to interest my kids in some of them. In my next post, I'll show you a few of the books.

Oh, almost forgot. Here are the dem curtains. (from Ikea)

p.s. If you're wondering, the stand on the left is where we keep our music CDs. The tall boxes are CD box sets. Yep, we're the kind of family who still buys CDs. (and by "we", I mean hubs)

It feels so good to get an area under control! There's one good thing about having your house burn down - you instantly get rid of all your clutter! Not a "fun" way to clean, but it certainly leaves you feeling "free" and "unfettered". You know that you are probably a perfectionist. You want it clean and tidy, but you put it off until you can do it right! You probably work on other projects until you are too exhausted to even think about cleaning up the resulting mess the way you want it done.Congratulations on the clean room!

I think, if I had to put up new curtains, I'd want to clean first, too - why put up something new if the rest of the place will be a mess? Well, I think it turned out great, and I like the way your window frames look.

Just about the only time I clean my workroom is when I have no place left to work, I never want to use my free time to do it. But the bookshelf - that can be fun - I cleaned mine up a few weeks ago & pulled off all the books I've never read. They're now sitting in a pile on the floor and now maybe I'll read them because they're in the way. Somehow though, the shelf they used to be on is already filled up with new stuff. How did that happen?

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Welcome to my world!

My name is Jane. I live in Singapore with my 2 kids, hubs, a few hundred bags and a growing bag pattern empire. Thanks for visiting my blog. This is where I share my journey thru' bag making. Okay, it's not always about bags but one thing I can promise you - every bag has a story.